


Sleep isn't an Escape, It's a Trap

by endlesschaos



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Gen, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Worried Dean Winchester, could be a deathfic or not, depends on how you look at it lol, not wincest even if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:47:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26054428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endlesschaos/pseuds/endlesschaos
Summary: The first time it happens, he has no idea what’s going on. He’s in the Impala and Dean is driving.-AKA I have no idea what I wrote. Here are some words and a weird plotline!
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 10
Kudos: 47





	Sleep isn't an Escape, It's a Trap

The first time it happens, he has no idea what’s going on. He’s in the Impala and Dean is driving.

But he can’t keep his thoughts straight. He doesn’t even have a concussion. They’re driving back from a hunt that he barely even fought in. His thoughts won’t stay linear and the ones he can grasp onto feel more like concepts than anything solid.

It feels like the trials again, but his insides aren’t burning, and he hasn’t been sleeping any worse than usual. He even ate a whole meal at lunch today.

“We’ve got time.” He thinks he hears Dean say that. He could’ve imagined it. Either way, he whispers, “Six whole hours,” and has no idea what they’re counting down to.

He thinks the word ‘blood’ and feels like it means something. He doesn’t understand what he’s supposed to be thinking or even what he’s supposed to be looking at – he’s in the Impala, right? Dean’s driving? He has no idea where he is.

“Sam. Six hours? What?” Now he knows he heard Dean say that.

“You said we had time. We have six hours.”

“No, I didn’t – Sam, are you feeling okay?” No, but he can’t say that because he doesn’t know what not okay feels like. He doesn’t know what okay feels like. He’s just – not. He turns to look where he hears Dean’s voice coming from and thinks, _huh, there I am_.

He’s in the Impala and Dean is driving and out the window he sees himself. He sees his high school graduation – the one where Dean showed up and the one his Dad never mentioned. He sees his fifth birthday – the one where Dean bought him a box of Lucky Charms and the one his Dad never mentioned. He sees his 21st birthday – the one where he got a text from Dean wishing him a _Happy Birthday, Sammy, go get too drunk_ and Jess is telling him to get off his phone and celebrate and the one his Dad never mentioned. Huh. He’s in the Impala and Dean is driving.

He wakes up with words on his tongue but can’t remember what they were supposed to be. He’s feverish with thoughts and stories he was supposed to tell, burning up with unspoken words he was supposed to share. He’s shivering and Dean is asking him what’s wrong, but he can’t answer that. His throat won’t let him, so he shakes his head, _I don’t know, something’s not right, I don’t know what’s wrong_.

He’s in the Impala and Dean isn’t driving. They’re outside the Bunker and Dean’s trying to get him out of the car, but he can’t hear him. Dean’s lifting him out of his seat and he thinks he’s walking, but he also thinks Dean’s carrying him.

He’s in his room and Dean is staring at him like he’s about to die. He doesn’t know if he’s right. He sleeps.

-

He’s in his room and his door is cracked and Dean is talking quietly to someone right outside.

“We were driving back from a case and all of a sudden he gets this look on his face like he has no idea where he is. He hasn’t been coherent in hours and you’re telling me there’s nothing wrong?”

“Physically. There’s nothing wrong physically.” Cas. He recognizes Cas.

“Oh, well, great, so you have no idea what’s wrong with him.”

Sam gets out of bed and opens the door. Dean looks surprised like he expected Sam to rot away in that bed until he died.

“I think I know what six hours meant, now, Dean,” he says, and it makes no sense, but this is the most coherent he’s been in hours so maybe he’s allowed a little bit of confusion.

“What?”

“How long was I out of commission?”

“Oh. How’d you know?”

“No idea, figured if it’s been hours, maybe six hours just meant that’s how long whatever that was lasted.” Dean’s still staring at him like he’s about to die, but it’s less immediate, less frantic.

“So, what, you’re fine now? You basically collapsed in the car and couldn’t hear or even speak for hours, but you’re just fine now?”

“Yeah, I mean, I guess. I have no idea what just happened, but I can stand now, I can think, I can follow a conversation. Whatever happened is over.”

Cas is staring at him like he knows something Sam doesn’t, but also like it doesn’t make sense, doesn’t fit. Sam has seen that face too many times to not know what it means.

-

It doesn’t happen again for another six months. He'd almost forgotten about the whole episode, until, he’s standing in the kitchen staring down at a pot like it’s supposed to tell him secrets. He lets go of the pot, not sure if it makes a sound as it hits the floor. It should, right? Metal against concrete isn’t exactly quiet.

Dean comes into the room just as Sam slides to the floor, face blank. He’s holding empty beer bottles, fingers twitching against their necks, watching Sam sit and lean against the fridge. He’s terrified.

Sam doesn’t see Dean. He barely sees the kitchen. He sees himself. He sees himself falling into the Cage – Dean’s there, he knows, he had to watch Lucifer take everything from him. He sees himself sacrificing victims just to get to the monster – as if the monster isn’t him, soulless and machine-like. He sees Lucifer breathing down his neck at a shitty diner in a tiny town in Oklahoma – he’s singing a Tiny Tim song, Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moon, Sam thinks, but he doesn’t try very hard to place the songs Lucifer sings.

Dean is there, though, in the kitchen in the bunker and in almost every vision Sam sees around him. Dean is there, shaking him, holding his face, trying to get Sam to hear him, to _listen to me, Sammy, can you hear me? Sam? What’s going on? Talk to me, Sam. Sam!_

All Sam hears is a voice that’s eerily similar to Dean’s say, _It didn’t work the first time, don’t worry, we have more time now._ He doesn’t think it’s Dean, but he doesn’t know anything.

“Ten hours.” He says it like an afterthought, but he thinks it should be more important than that. He doesn’t know what it means anyway. He sleeps.

-

He’s in his room and his door is cracked and Dean is talking quietly to someone right outside.

It’s only the second time and he already hates the familiarity.

“What the hell, Cas? Like, seriously, what?”

“There’s nothing. At all. He’s not just asleep, he’s not dreaming or thinking, he’s just gone.”

“How in the hell does that even work? He’s alive –“ _for now_ , Sam thinks, “so what the hell do you mean he’s just gone?”

Sam wants to stand and tell Dean he’s up now, he’s alright. Ten hours, he recalls. This one has ended. He wants to let Dean know they’re in the clear for now, but he can’t move his legs. He thinks he hears Cas respond, but he’s forgotten how to listen for it. He thinks that’s a bad sign, but he can’t focus on his thoughts long enough to connect action and meaning.

He looks at the door and sees it swing open as Dean enters. He looks scared, Sam thinks vaguely, not entirely sure what that means.

“You back with us, Sleeping Beauty?” Dean says when he sees Sam’s eyes are open.

Sam thinks about nodding, but all he can do is watch as a black-eyed Dean pulls out a hammer. He doesn’t remember two Deans. He doesn’t remember much of anything. He squints at the second Dean, the one who’s swinging the hammer around idly, wondering what he’s supposed to be remembering.

“Sam? You hearing me?” Both Deans say. He looks at the Dean that doesn’t look like he wants to kill him and watches him say, _We got time._

“Two whole hours.” His eyes slide closed, but he’s not asleep. He’s forgotten what that’s supposed to mean.

“Sam? No, we already did this. Come on, wake up, kiddo.” Dean’s leaning on the bed now, one knee propped up next to Sam’s hip, one hand on Sam’s face, shaking it.

“Dizzy,” he slurs. He wants to roll onto his side, try to calm the waves in his stomach, but he can’t move. Dean’s stopped shaking his face, but he has yet to move his hand.

“Cas, please, do something.” Sam opens his eyes long enough to see Cas sneer at him and whisper, _good luck coming back this time_.

It’s the third time and he’s not sure he was supposed to come back in the first place.

-

Dean doesn’t let him leave the bunker for two weeks after that. Sam claims he’s fine, but he understands. He kind of doesn’t want to leave either. Not yet, at least.

He makes it two more weeks before he has to convince Dean to go on a hunt or he’ll go insane. _Look, Dean, two kids gone in as many days. Completely drained. I killed the freaking alpha, I think we can handle a little nest, especially one this messy_. Dean doesn’t like it, but he’s just as antsy as Sam.

“We need this, Dean. I had six months between episodes last time. I’ll be fine.”  
  
“No, Sam, you had six seconds. But okay, if you feel weird at _all_ , we’re turning around and calling someone else in.” Sam thinks that’s the best he’s gonna get, especially considering Dean’s already on his way to his go-bag.

-

They managed to find the nest and knock out four out of five vamps when Sam gets hit in the head. Hard. He doesn’t have time to process it before he’s on the ground and his eyes are sliding closed to the image of one of the fallen vamps saying, _ah, today must be my lucky day. You came to me this time._ He sleeps.

Right off the bat, this time feels different. It’s not memories this time. They look and feel more like Azazel-induced visions. He sees a man walking up to someone bound to a chair, screaming for help. He sees Dean sitting on a counter behind the chair, smiling. It takes him way too long to realize he’s the one in the chair. The world turns upside down, so he turns around and sees train tracks. He sees Dean walking alongside them, yelling into a phone, _just do it, Cas. He’s gone, may as well just shoot him._ He gets an uneasy feeling Dean is talking about him. He doesn’t understand it. Dean would never, right? Dean turns and stares him directly in the eyes and says, _you’re finally getting it, aren’t you?_ He isn’t, but he nods anyway, terrified that disagreeing would be the wrong response. He turns to run, but ends up in a room, a closet, really. There’s a noose around his neck and a glass floor underneath him. Dean is standing in the corner, aiming his gun at the floor. _I’m already going down with you, let’s speed up the process, shall we?_ Dean says, cocking his gun and shooting.

Unlike the other two – three – times, Sam wakes up in a motel bed and Dean is talking to him, not someone else.

“Sam, c’mon, kid, wake up. You didn’t even tell me how long your lazy ass was gonna sleep this time.” He pauses for a few minutes, then softer, “Please, Sam. I can’t keep doing this. Please just wake up.”

He grunts as he tries to roll over, opening his eyes slowly. Dean’s by his side in a second, helping him sit up. He doesn’t remember being this sore the other few times, but he figures he also didn’t go down in the middle of a fight the last few times either.

“How long was it this time?” His voice is gravelly, and he has to cough to clear his throat.

“Thirteen hours. I almost took your ass to a hospital considering you went down from an actual head injury this time.”

Sam frowns. Longest time. “What happened with the case?”

“Jesus, Sam. No. The vamps were taken care of. Don’t worry about it. What the hell is going on with you?”

“What, you think I know? I have absolutely no idea and I’d really like it if it didn’t keep on happening.” He’s angry. He shouldn’t be, Dean is just worried, but he’s confused and tired and scared more than he’d like to admit. He rubs his eyes and says, “look, I’m sorry. I just, I don’t know what’s happening and every time it happens, he says we’ve got time as if he’s carving out time to fuck with me and I don’t like it.”

“Wait, what? He? Who the hell is he?”

And oh. He’d apparently forgotten to mention that he wasn’t exactly alone in his head during these episodes.

“I don’t know. This was the clearest one. I don’t remember much about the other times, but I remembered this one and it reminded me of him. I have no idea who he is, but he always says something right before I pass out. The last time at the bunker, he wished me luck.”

Dean looks like he wants to yell or punch something, but instead, he just says, “We need to figure this out, Sam. We can’t keep doing this.”

-

And the thing is, he knows he could research this. He knows he should. He should be searching for any answers that might be out there, yet any time he thinks too hard and too long about it, his stomach clenches up and his head gets fuzzy and he has to lay down for a while. So, between episodes, he ignores it. Pretends like it has never happened and will never happen.

Dean doesn’t get that. He asks Sam about it all the time. At least, he did before the third -fourth? He’s still not sure whether the second time counts as two separate instances. After their talk in the motel, Dean seems a bit warier to bring it up. Acts almost like Sam will collapse into an episode if he so much as thinks about it. Sam doesn’t know how he feels about that, but he thinks Dean might be right.

So, they ignore it. Most of the time. Sometimes Sam will find a case in a local newspaper and try to convince Dean they should work on it, but then Dean gets this look on his face like all he can see is Sam collapsing at the vamp nest and he’ll shake his head no and say _no, Sam, I’ll call up another hunter, let someone else be the hero_ , almost like he’s trying to make a joke without an actual punchline.

-

He doesn’t realize he’s gotten lucky every time he’s gone out without Dean until he’s at the mini-mart, picking up supplies (beer, paper towels, fruit), and he starts to lose track. He feels the back of his neck start to prickle and he turns around, expecting a demon or some other monster. Instead, he sees the clerk smiling at him from across the store. _No one here can help you,_ the clerk says.

His legs give out and he faintly hears the bottles crack and spray beer all over as they hit the linoleum floor, but pretty soon even his hearing is out too. He closes his eyes as his head smacks against the floor, his arms not working enough to slow his descent. He’s dizzy and he doesn’t understand a single thing that’s happening. He opens his eyes, struggling to stay awake this time. He needs Dean, but the clerk has no idea who Sam is or who Dean is or what the hell is happening so it’s not like he has a single chance of getting to him. He tries to move his head, his hand, anything, but all he gets is glass cutting into his cheek and beer soaking into his jeans. He sees work boots coming around the aisle and he thinks maybe Dean decided to tag along anyway, but instead, he just gets a kick in the face and he’s out like a light.

-

He wakes up in the Impala and Dean’s driving down winding roads, taking the turns faster than he should. He has no idea how long he was out, he has no idea where he was before, he just knows he’s not really in the Impala and Dean isn’t really in the driver’s seat next to him.

He still can’t move his head, but his eyes are open and the Dean look-a-like turns to look at him.

“Jesus, thought you were gonna make me do this whole drive alone.” Dean’s smiling, a genuine smile Sam only saw when things were really good. A genuine smile Sam hadn’t seen in years. “C’mon, Sammy, I’ve been driving for hours, talk to me, keep me awake.”

He wants to say something, he feels like the words are choking him, suffocating him, but he can’t even unclench his teeth or move his neck, so he keeps staring at Dean’s profile.

“Hey, remember the summer of ’93, you had just turned 10, and Dad took us to Mount Rainier? He’d just finished that hunt in Yakima – a rugaru or something – and he’d wanted to do something for us.” Sam remembers that trip like it was yesterday. It was right before Sam had realized he didn’t have to be a hunter forever and he found his anger that he used to fuel his arguments with their Dad. He thinks of it as his last truly good memory of his father.

“I remember you almost fell asleep right as we were about to head back down the trail and Dad had to carry you the rest of the way.” Even if he hadn’t already been looking at Dean, Sam would’ve heard the smile in his voice.

Sam closes his eyes, thinking about how safe he’d felt on that trip, despite knowing that as soon as the sun set, chances were some kind of monster would be hunting in those woods, on that path. Looking back, he thinks the hike was a way for John to scope out the area, rather than just a harmless trip with his kids. He’ll hold onto his fondness for the memory either way.

-

When he wakes up for real, he’s on the floor of the library in the bunker, his arms scraped to hell like he lost a fight with a rather motivated shrub. He has no idea how he ended up back home, but he can move so he’s fairly certain he really is awake. He sits up, noticing how his head is throbbing and the cut on his cheek has scabbed over in a way that hurts when he opens his mouth.

“Dean?” He calls. He faintly hears Dean’s boots making their way through the halls.

“I send you out for beer and you leave for a whole day. What does a guy have to do to- Sam?” He cuts himself off when he sees Sam on the floor, blood covering his arms and face.

All Sam can do is say, “it happened again,” before Dean’s rushing out of the room. He comes back with their first aid kit and some towels, but he looks terrified.

“How’d you get home? Where were you? What happened?” Dean’s interrogating him, but all Sam can do is shrug as Dean starts cleaning him up.

“One second I was in the mini-mart, the next I’m here.”

Dean doesn’t look like he really wants to ask what comes next, but he forces himself to anyway. “What did he say this time?”

“Nothing,” Sam says, purposefully forgetting the clerk’s threat and ignoring Dean’s raised eyebrow. “It was like I was just dreaming. You and me in the car and you were telling me about the Rainier trip we took as kids.”

Dean’s eyebrows furrow, but he focuses on putting antiseptic on Sam’s cuts. Sam doesn’t get it. Each time this has happened before, he hadn’t been able to move. He’d been dead to the world. This time, he not only managed to make his way home but hurt himself in the process. There was a pattern at first, but now it was like the rules were changing and he couldn’t keep up.

-

The next time it happens, Sam has no recollection of it at all. All he knows is he’s waking up in the backseat of the Impala and Dean is passed out in the front. He’s tired and Dean doesn’t look much better, so he goes back to sleep, cold with confusion and vague memories of other times he’s woken up where he didn’t fall asleep and how he wasn’t in control those times either.

-

The constant fear of Sam’s KO’s finally convinces him to turn to the bunker’s archives. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but simple possession doesn’t seem to cut it. He starts looking into old gods, creatures that have existed for millennia, and only seem to crop up when everything else is quiet.

Sometimes, late at night when Sam really wants to freak himself out, he wonders if Lucifer has managed to contact him from the cage.

He tries not to let himself get to that point too often.

It takes a few weeks, but he finds a book in the back of the archives that has a chapter on an old being that doesn’t seem to have a name, but that the Men of Letters have nicknamed Mara in the margins. He doesn’t get much information except that this Mara is as old as or older than Death itself and doesn’t much like humanity.

Dean thinks Mara is some hopped up Djinn, but Sam reminds him he’s missing a blue handprint and a Djinn to attack him in the first place.

Sam just wonders if he’ll ever have autonomy or if all the universe’s creatures have decided he’s fair game.

-

The last time it happens, Mara says goodbye. They take the form of his father and say from behind Dean, _you’re getting too close, that’s not the point, this is the end for now_ , and Sam feels relieved until he realizes he still can’t move and Dean is leaning over him on the floor of Sam’s bedroom, pleading with him to just wake up, _please, Sammy, just wake up, it’s time to get up, Jody needs us, Cas needs us, we have to go help them, oh god, Sam, please_.

He wants to tell Dean it’s okay, he knows now it was always going to end like this. Each time before was just practice. Dean will be okay, and Sam will be too, he just can’t be okay here anymore. He wants to tell Dean he’ll be alright. He’s at peace.

He sleeps.

-

He wakes up. He’s in the Impala and Dean is driving. He smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> hope you enjoyed this! i'm really unsure what this is supposed to be but i hope it made enough sense. let me know what you think!
> 
> also now that i'm slightly less sleep-deprived, i've realized the name mara is way too similar to amara, but it's not based on the darkness! the name is based on old norse lore about a creature that brings on nightmares.


End file.
